History

The
history of Idaho can be divided into three somewhat overlapping periods. The
first lasted about 12,000 years and included the long period of Native American
Indian presence in the area. This period ended after the Indians realized
too late that Euro-American visitors were going to remain in Idaho permanently
and that their settlement was going to destroy Indian lifeways and resources.
Grazing cattle, for example, ruined camas root collecting fields.

The event in Idaho most symbolic
of the end of Indian resistance occurred in 1877 when the U.S. Army defeated
the Nez Perce Indians in the Nez Perce War. Chief Joseph decided that the
survival of his people was better than probable annihilation and said at the
treaty-making, "I will fight no more forever." The army scattered Nez Perce
horses, a major source of wealth for the Nez Perce people.

The
second period was considerably shorter in duration than the first and involved
the removal of natural resources from the state. Early trappers collected
beaver to serve the men's fashion market in Europe. The ambition of gold-rush
miners who flooded into Idaho after 1860 was to find and remove gold and,
later, silver. For a few years in the 1880s, the "cattle kingdom" reigned
in southern Idaho. Cattle and sheep by the hundreds of thousands fattened
on virgin grasslands and were driven to rail heads for shipping to east or
west coast markets.

After the large timber companies
in Minnesota and Wisconsin had depleted the forests in that region, they came
to Idaho and discovered its vast white pine and other conifer forests. The
towns that grew up around logging operations and mills lasted as long as the
timber and then became ghost towns.

Resource
industries gave Idaho history all of the excitement and color that goes with
"boom and bust" economic activity. The books tell of lucky strikes, mining
camp lore, vigilante justice, hard winters, back-breaking work, and heart-breaking
shifts of fortune. Chinese miners were among those seeking to find gold and
return home wealthy, so the books also detail their special fortitude in the
face of social and political intolerance.

Agriculture developed in Idaho
to support the thousands of people working the mines all over the state. In
southeast Idaho, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints--the Mormons--sent
pioneers to extend its earthly kingdom of God northward from Utah. Regardless
of religion, farming was a family-based industry, requiring the partnership
of women with men in order to succeed. Children were necessary contributors
to the labor of a farm. When women came to Idaho, they came to stay. Women
inspired much of the community-building that accounts for the organization
of schools, libraries, hospitals, charitable organizations, and parks found
in Idaho's small towns.

By
the time the placer gold deposits played out, the railroads had come to Idaho,
connecting farmers and ranchers to markets far beyond the mining camps. Agriculture
thus continued to grow. When the federal government enacted the Carey Act
in 1894 and then the Reclamation Act in 1902, it made possible a significant
expansion in agriculture. These acts resulted in large, complex irrigation
projects--impossible without federal financing--that removed water from rivers
and delivered it to rich desert soils. Cities and towns grew apace with the
increase in the number of farms and ranches, shifting their support function
from mining and logging to agriculture.

In addition to being rich in natural
resources, Idaho proved to be energy rich as well. Its rivers, particularly
the Snake River and its tributaries in southern Idaho, became the "central
stations" generating hydroelectric power used to pump water onto desert soils
where gravity flow systems could not. Electrically supported agriculture became
a major Idaho "growth machine" from 1900 through the 1960s.

When combining the soil and water
resources of Idaho with a benign climate, federal irrigation investments,
and hydroelectric power, the industrious settlers created a powerful agricultural
industry. Idaho shipped wheat, potatoes, peas, dry beans, sugar (from beets),
apples, cherries, peaches, mint, onions, and many other products to markets
all over the world. Due chiefly to the marketing genius of certain potato
growers in the early 1900s, the "Idaho" potato became an identifiable product
controlled by Idaho interests rather than commodity brokers in Chicago and
other market centers.

The large-scale extraction of
Idaho resources has led some historians to inquire into the structure and
political impact of the resource-based industries. "Outside capital" was an
essential element in the development of roads, railways, hard-rock mines,
and huge lumber mills. Was Idaho a "colonial" state whose destiny was more
in the hands of eastern entrepreneurs than those of Idaho residents?

This second period of Idaho's
history did not entirely close. Natural resources continue to be removed and
sent out of state. But the most concentrated reserves of minerals have been
discovered and removed. Remaining ores are more difficult to mine profitably.
Timber remains an asset, but the cost of managing it as a renewable resource
is far higher than earlier "cut and run" practices. Cattle continue to graze
in Idaho, but the rangelands are not as rich as they once were.

More
than sixty percent of the land in Idaho is owned and managed by the federal
government. This is the land that was too high, too dry, too steep, or too
remote to have attracted settlers during the optimistic drive westward to
make the United States' destiny manifest. All resource industries using this
land must contend with federal laws aimed at preventing the excessive environmental
degradation typical of the early years.

Perhaps the election of Cecil
D. Andrus as governor of Idaho in 1970 could symbolize the end of the state's
domination by the "extraction" industries. The big election issue that year
was whether the ASARCO mining company would be permitted to develop a molybdenum
mine in the White Cloud mountains of central Idaho. The incumbent governor
had said, "The good Lord never intended us to lock up our resources." But
Andrus felt that it made no sense to "destroy a beautiful area that was still
pristine--just the way God created it--for a mineral that was in surplus worldwide."

The people elected Andrus, effectively
shutting ASARCO out of the White Clouds. If Idaho ever had been a "colonial"
region, it had declared its independence. The next thirty years seem to open
a third period of Idaho history--a period of increasing diversity of all kinds.
Within the state, the hundred-year-old consensus--nearly unanimous up to that
point--that the expansion of agriculture and the exploitation of natural resources
was the only way for the state to prosper began to break down.

The environmental movement of
the 1970s brought many of the new ideas, new people, and new challenges to
the status-quo. A group of citizen rate-payers challenged the Idaho Power
Company, which had been supplying ever-growing amounts of electricity for
agricultural expansion at the expense of urban and other rate payers. They
won their point in Idaho's courts, effectively creating a limit to agricultural
expansion in southern Idaho.

The
modern electronic industry has been footloose enough to find Idaho. The 1970s
saw the arrival of a large Hewlett-Packard manufacturing plant in Boise and
the sprouting of Micron, a home-grown company that makes dynamic random access
memory chips and other products. Similar businesses landed in Coeur d'Alene,
Idaho Falls, and other Idaho cities.

Between 1980 and 1990, Idaho's
population reached and surpassed one million. The cities are growing, mostly
due to in-migration; rural areas on the fringe of such urban growth are growing
more than those that are not. The complexion of the Idaho legislature changes
slightly each time the decennial census requires redistricting, becoming more
"urban."

The current period of Idaho's
history has the excitement and color brought to it by the growing complexity
of the people now living here. Many of its new settlers have come to retire,
while others are intent on building new enterprises and new wealth. Religious
and racial diversity continue to grow. Idaho cities have mosques and Buddhist
temples. Consensus on public issues is harder to obtain as newcomers scrap
with "fifth generation" Idahoans about what is important and what is not.
Working out a new consensus for Idaho's future is the stuff that will fill
tomorrow's history books.